The nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to fill the Stevens seat on the Supreme Court is a wise pick for a president who is no longer flying high in the polls, and who can’t afford a contentious confirmation fight — or, worse yet, yet another busted appointment.

Although Kagan is quite liberal, she has played well with conservatives. Although her scholarly record is comparatively modest, she has a track record of supporting strong — dare I say Bushian (or even Cheneyian) — views of presidential power. And although she is a liberal, for many on the left she is not nearly liberal enough.

With President Obama at a 39 percent re-elect number (that is, only 39 percent of voters say they’d vote for him today, according to a recent National Journal poll, while 50 percent would vote for someone else), and with early indicators suggesting that a 1994-style drubbing for the Democrats might be in the offing, the Kagan pick is a safe, low-risk move for a president who can’t afford to run too many more risks at the moment.

She is an establishment pick. Just the phrase “former dean of Harvard Law School” can be expected to provide Obama with some insulation against charges of picking a left-leaning extremist: Harvard and Yale are brands that provide some protection, just as in the old days corporate purchasing agents used to say that nobody got fired for buying IBM. And many voters still think (erroneously) of Harvard Law School as a conservative place where professors like the imposing Kingsfield of “The Paper Chase” hold court.

Though some people — such as law professor David Bernstein, writing on lawprof blog The Volokh Conspiracy — decry the dominance of Harvard and Yale on the court, one of the perennial selling points for the Ivy League is that Ivy League hires are easier to defend in this fashion.

As an establishment pick, she’ll also get some breaks from the establishment. As dean of Harvard Law School, Kagan banned military recruiters from her campus and fought legislation aimed at ending such bans, because of her (and the legal academy’s) opposition to the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. But many, many law school deans are in the same position, and can be counted on to defend her, or at least to soft-pedal any criticism.

Likewise, Kagan’s relative openness to conservative and libertarian organizations like the Federalist Society, and her willingness to hire conservative scholars at Harvard, leaves her with a reservoir of goodwill among people on the right who might otherwise be inclined to try to torpedo her candidacy. There will still be opposition, of course, but it will likely lack the edge and intensity that might have been provoked by a different candidate.

As I’ve noted elsewhere, Kagan’s ability to get along with people suggests that she might be a more potent influence on the high court than a more obviously ideological pick would be. The most effective liberal on the court ever was Justice William J. Brennan, whose ideology was sufficiently muted that he was nominated by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower.

Brennan was never an intellectual star of the court, but he was very skilled at picking up the fifth vote that would turn a minority position into a majority opinion. “With five votes,” Brennan once said, “you can do anything.” Obama may well hope that Kagan will wield a similar influence.

That said, however, there is little doubt in my mind that if the president were unconstrained, he would have picked someone more in keeping with his own ideological leanings — which is to say someone considerably to the left of Kagan. That he went, instead, with a safe pick is as much evidence of Obama’s current weakness as of Kagan’s undeniable strengths.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is the Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee. He hosts “InstaVision” for PJTV.com.